Irish Shadows on British Counter-Terrorism Policy

The long conflict between the British state and the Irish
Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland
was central to creating UK
counter-terrorism policy. But what was really being created was a policy
specifically to counter Irish republican terrorism, and this has turned out to
not be the optimal solution in facing other types of threats. In a major
speech in 2007, Peter Clarke, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police Service, made this point: “the fact is that the Irish
campaign actually operated within a set of parameters that helped shape our
response to it”.

For the UK
the emphasis is now on the threat of violence from Jihadi terrorism rather than
Irish groups, but for the security establishment it has taken time to adapt to
the different situation. This point was very well made by Tufyal Choudhury of
University of Durham at a conference I attended this week at the Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies called “Social
Cohesion in the Context of Counter-Terrorism Policies: A Contradiction?”
Choudhury noted that in the Northern Irish situation, the Republican movement
had a shared aim of Northern Ireland
leaving the UK
and joining the Republic. This was equally true for those in the IRA who
believed in ‘armed struggle’ and those in SDLP who rejected all use of
violence. In the case of Islamic extremism in the UK, the situation is the opposite:
the extremists not only share no political project with the wider Muslim
community, but indeed self-identify in opposition to the wider community. They
see themselves as ‘true Muslims’ and the wider community as ‘bad Muslims’ for
adopting less fundamentalist views. For the security establishment looking on,
it took time to realise this meant that, unlike in the Northern Irish case, the
wider Muslim community generally did not understand or even know about the
extremists. The exact same point has also been made to me by a senior London counter-terrorist
police officer.

According to
Choudhury, this phenomenon also meant that there has been denial within British
Muslim communities about the reality of Islamic extremism amongst ‘their own’.
Because the police and security service were conditioned by the Irish campaign
into an expectation that the wider community would know about extremists within
their midst, this created distrust in both directions. The police thought that
they were not getting intelligence from an uncooperative community, and British
Muslims believed the police were blaming them for a phenomenon that they did
not see or have experience of. This is why Choudhury argues that the
investigation and prosecution of terrorist cases within the current legal
system is so important. He believes that the verdicts of the lengthy terrorism
trials, (such as the one
that concluded this week with guilty verdicts for Tanvir
Hussain, Abdulla Ahmed Ali and Assad Sarwar for the 2006 plot to down numerous
airliners over the Atlantic using liquid explosives), have been central to
dispelling that denial within the Muslim community and increasing trust in the
police and judicial system.